“[T]oday, while liberals are (temporarily) out of power, it is now progressive judges who are telling the President, and everyone else, to “stop.”
“The risk here is clear. Judge Lee warns that the ‘judicial resistance’ will ‘risk inching towards an imperial judiciary that lords over the President and Congress.’ Here, Judge Lee invoked Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s ruling in Trump v. CASA (2025), in which she warned against “embracing an imperial judiciary.” We can take the lineage back even further. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1991), the landmark decision reaffirming Roe v. Wade, Justice Scalia declared, “The Imperial Judiciary lives.” Of course, the “Nietzschean vision of . . . unelected, life-tenured judges” Scalia warned against belonged to five members of the Supreme Court. Scalia would often to his colleagues. But now the resistance has spread to the inferior federal courts.
“This status quo is not sustainable. Either the President will retain his role as the chief of the executive branch, or he will not. Either the Supreme Court will retain its position as the Supreme Court, or it will not. I, for one, will resist being ruled by the inferior imperial judiciary. “
Again, observe the hypocrisy. The entire Democratic platform in 2024 was to “save democracy” from Donald Trump, yet it is Democrats and their allies on benches who are are deliberately, as Blackman writes, flipping the Constitution’s structure upside down. “In this 250th year of our independence, the horizontal and vertical structure of our government should be well settled,” he writes. “Horizontally, the legislative branch makes the law; the executive branch enforces the laws; and the judicial branch interprets the laws. Vertically, Congress sits atop the lawmaking powers, not administrative agencies; the President sits atop the enforcement power, not the bureaucracy; and the Supreme Court sits atop the judiciary, not the inferior courts. Critically, the states have no role in enforcing or impeding federal law.”
“Yet somehow,” Blackman observes, “everything has gone topsy-turvy. Under the new order of operations, the President takes an action, states bring a lawsuit, a district court judge decides whether the policy goes into effect, and then two or three members of the Supreme Court promptly settle the issue with near finality.”
It’s crucial to recognize who are the ethics miscreants here, as well as the foes of our democracy. It isn’t President Trump.
Post Script: Pssst! Professor! It isn’t Schoolhouse “Rocks,” it’s Schoolhouse Rock. As Old Biff admonishes his younger self in “Back to the Future II” when Young Biff says, “Make like a tree and get outa here!,” “You sound like an idiot when you say things like that!”
Ethics Alarms 
Are we in danger of a break in the judiciary? If the lower courts keep ignoring the precedents set by the higher courts, why should anyone listen to the lower courts? If some entity, like the President, takes the step to ignore the lower court injunctions instead of litigating the same issue yet again, does that not cross a line from which there is no coming back? Suddenly the judiciary is without fangs because it speaks, but no one listens?
“Yet somehow,” Blackman observes, “everything has gone topsy-turvy. Under the new order of operations, the President takes an action, states bring a lawsuit, a district court judge decides whether the policy goes into effect, and then two or three members of the Supreme Court promptly settle the issue with near finality.”
And Democrats and their allies in the news media, et al, loudly undermine the legitimacy of the Supreme Court: “Trump’s Court”, “Conservative-Majority Court”
Meanwhile, Judge Murphy continues in Massachusetts: Judge blocks vaccine changes by RFK Jr.’s advisory panel – Roll Call
Trump’s old friend judge Boasberg is at it again…apparently mind-reading and pre-trying cases all by himself.
There is precedent for a President ignoring court rulings.
Andrew Jackson ignored the 1832 Supreme Court ruling “Worcester v. Georgia” as he deemed Georgia’s laws in Cherokee territory unconstitutional; he is romored to have said “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!”.
Abraham Lincoln ignored Chief Justice Taney’s writ of habeas corpus during the Civil War.
I am not suggesting that Trump should ignore the Supreme Court, however it could be politically wise to ignore hyper-partisan lower courts who basically enacting their political preferences from the bench, all the while recent Supreme Court precedent. This will create a constitutional crisis, but maybe that is precisely what is needed to force clarity on the boundaries of the power of the courts. Force the issues in front of the Supreme Court and Congress. The Constitution itself assumes the three branches of government to be equal, and does not support the philosophy of judicial supremacy.